English

Life Of St. Columban, By The Monk, Jonas

"THE use by readers and students of those original documents from which our knowledge of history is so largely drawn has come to be valued in recent times at something like its true worth. The sequence of past events, the form and spirit of institutions, the characters of men, the prevailing habits of thought, obtain their greatest reality when we study them in the very words used by the men to whom the past was the living present. Even historians who have not been characterized by a close dependence on the results of patient investigation of the sources have recognized the superiority of an appeal to original testimony. Mr. Froude says, "Wherever possible, let us not be told about this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak, let us see him act, and let us be left to form our own opinion about him." And in "Stones of Venice," Mr. Ruskin writes, "the only history worth reading is that written at the time of which it treats, the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw. One fresh draught of such history is worth more than a thousand volumes of abstracts, and reasonings, and suppositions and theories." " Digitized by Google. · Cover

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